'Millionaire' runs up £5m loss

Thursday 17 January 2002 00:00 BST

AT ONE stage it looked like it would come down to asking the audience to help out, going 50-50 or phoning a very wealthy friend. Because, in a puzzle as tricky as any posed by Chris Tarrant, TV executives had to work out exactly how Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? - the most successful game show of recent years - managed to lose almost £5m.

The answer was simply that it gave away too much prize money and fewer would-be contestants were phoning its premium rate 60p-a-minute phone line.

In its latest series, the quiz gave contestants £6.7m from its prize fund, which operates separately from the show's other lucrative commercial operations. The fund's income comes solely from viewers' calls - but in the last series it accrued just £1.8m.

It has been in the red since series five and began losing millions from series eight in September 2000. Between then and the last, tenth, series of the show, ITV has provided £14m to bail out the fund.

At its peak in March 1999, 19m viewers tuned in to watch Tarrant offer contestants thousands to test their general knowledge. However, on Tuesday it drew an audience of just 6.4m, trailing behind BBC's Holby City which pulled in 7.7m viewers.

Colin Robertson, news editor at Broadcast magazine, said ITV bosses had previously described Millionaire as 'an Exocet missile' because it was a powerful weapon in the ratings war. But he believed they would have been dismayed by the show's performance on Tuesday.

He said: 'They use it to pick up ratings and also to set up the rest of the evening's schedule. It doesn't seem to be the Exocet that it was. In fact, its turning into an Afghan cruise missile.'

ITV's senior manager Paul Tyrrell defended the show, saying it was 'a prized asset in the ITV schedule. If a programme needs subsidising in its prize fund, we will provide that and we will do it because Millionaire makes commercial sense to us.'

A spokeswoman for Celador, the company that produces the show, said: 'The amount paid out in prizes has gone up because people have learned how to play the game. They have learned the best time to ask the audience and phone a friend.' Listed TV services firm Avesco owns 49% of Celador's parent, Complete Communications.